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One example of that trend, she said, is the membership growth of the Corporate Legal
Operations Consortium (CLOC), a group dedicated to helping legal operations professionals.
CLOC, which became a nonprofit in 2016, has nearly 1,300 members worldwide.

The increasing importance of the profession reflects evolution in the legal industry,
including changes in how companies are purchasing legal services and the rising responsibilities
of general counsel, said Brenton, CLOC’s president and CEO.

Brenton Feb. 12 discussed with Bloomberg Law how CLOC began as a Silicon Valley initiative
.

Bloomberg Law: When and why was CLOC formed?

Connie Brenton: I founded CLOC in 2010. I was new to California, in a new legal operations role at
Oracle, reporting to the general counsel, Dorian Daley. Dorian had identified a need
for benchmarking information as part of a large legal operations project. Having recently
moved to Silicon Valley, I had not yet developed a large local professional network,
so I started with my colleagues at Google (Mary O’Carroll [Google head of legal operations]),
Christine Coats, from Symantec, (who is interestingly now the VP of Legal Operations
at Oracle), and a few others to see if they could help. I did not know them well at
the time, and what I was looking for was input on best practices in the new field
of legal operations—information that you couldn’t get with a Google search. We met
in person and immediately realized that we could benefit from these kinds of exchanges.
We affectionately refer to this original group as an information book club (others
referred to it as therapy). We shared best practices and provided each other support
and encouragement.

Over the years the group grew and grew and by 2015, the role of legal operations had
become a more common role in the industry and its influence had spread, globally.
Thus, around January 2016 we turned our book club into a nonprofit 501(c)(6) corporation:
the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC).

Today, CLOC is the world’s largest, fastest growing and most active group of legal
operations professionals. In two years we went from an informal group of 40 to nearly
1,300 legal operations professionals, representing 40 states, 37 countries, on five
continents. We will hold three global institutes this year—the inaugural London institute;
Las Vegas (the largest of the three institutes with an expected 2,500 attendees),
and the inaugural Australian institute to be held on Sept. 4, 2018, in Sydney.

Bloomberg Law: Since you formed, your membership and attendance at your conferences
have jumped. Why is legal operations becoming such a trend?

Brenton: Since the role of the general counsel has fundamentally changed, the job of running
legal like a business must be handled by someone other than the GC. Thus the rise
of the corporate legal operations professional.

CLOC was created in response to two fundamental questions: What does it mean to run
a corporate legal department like a business, and how do you do that? Since this role
is new to the industry and the law schools have not yet incorporated training for
these skills into the law school curriculum, the need to educate fueled our growth.
Providing exceptional and practical content is driving interest not only in CLOC but
in the rapidly growing field of corporate legal operations.

Bloomberg Law: You see CLOC not only as an industry-initiated group, but also one
that will transform the legal industry. How so?

Brenton: We have found that it is impossible to answer these questions in isolation. It is
going to take a community. One of the founding principles of CLOC is a culture of
collaboration and a culture that embraces the legal ecosystem. Solutions of the past,
built in isolation, don’t work; that’s been proven. The new and expanded legal ecosystem
comprises in-house counsel, outside counsel, law companies, technology companies,
law schools, and regulators. Collaboration among these sectors creates efficient win-win-win
solutions.

The purchase of legal services has also fundamentally changed. There are new entrants
offering options to source more routine legal work at a lower cost and higher quality.

There are many law firms, law companies, technology providers and others that are
keeping up with the changes in the industry. We are working closely with many of them,
changing the legal industry, together.

Bloomberg Law: Going forward, CLOC is planning to try to make changes in U.S. legal
professional rules. Why, and where do you anticipate starting first?

Brenton: CLOC leaders have met with the GCs of some of the largest law firms in the world.
We are discussing ways to collaborate and collectively move the industry forward,
together, talking about topics like the non-authorized practice of law, and others.

Bloomberg Law: CLOC would like to see a legal services ecosystem underpinned by collaboration
and the sharing of information and expertise. The phrase ‘open source’ comes to mind.
How realistic is this?

Brenton: It is already real. We refer to these as “CLOC Initiatives.” The solutions are crowd-sourced,
leveraging every member of the legal ecosystem, and these solutions are then freely
shared throughout the entire legal community. Check out CLOC.org to see the Initiatives
that are completed.

Last week 28 of us in the legal ecosystem, led by Gary Tully, [director of legal operations
at] Gilead Sciences, met at NetApp. The cross-functional group included AmLaw100 CIOs,
legal operations professionals and technology providers. We spent two days together
discussing the creation of a joint cybersecurity solution, an industry standard. We
discussed a solution where we can not only crowd-source the content, we can crowd-source
data and analytics.

Raise your hand if you’d like to lead an industry initiative. By creating standards,
we can drive efficiencies, solidify best practices, and keep our focus on the more
complex areas where we can add value to our firms, to our companies, and we can graduate
a new generation of law students, ready to practice law, upon graduation.

From the beginning, CLOC was about how can we collaborate to do it better, together.

Bloomberg Law: How is CLOC helping in legal operations?

Brenton: As CLOC became a more formal organization, encouraging a more structured sharing of
best practices, we realized that we needed to codify the essential disciplines of
legal operations. We created an industry standard definition of legal operations:
legal operations is a multi-disciplinary function within a legal department that optimizes
services delivery to a business or government entity focusing on CLOC’s 12 core competencies.

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